Last week ended with a squid-headed creature in a Dalek casing declaring itself the future of its species, and I said I couldn’t tell whether that was brilliant or ridiculous. Having watched the resolution, I can report: it’s both, and the proportions aren’t in its favour. “Evolution of the Daleks” has one of the best ideas the show has ever had about its oldest enemy, and it surrounds that idea with a muddle. Picking up straight from Daleks in Manhattan, this is a frustrating hour — genuinely thoughtful in places, faintly embarrassing in others.
The Dalek Who Felt
The good stuff first, because it’s very good. Dalek Sec, having folded a human into himself, starts changing — and not in the way he planned. He wanted human resilience and human cunning. What he gets is human feeling. He begins to hesitate. He begins to sympathise. He looks at the plan to hollow out a thousand people and finds, to his own horror, that he no longer wants to do it.
That’s a magnificent idea, and it puts a proper tragedy at the centre of the episode. Sec isn’t redeemed exactly — he’s a war criminal having a conscience installed against his will — but he becomes something genuinely new: a Dalek arguing that his species must stop being what it is in order to deserve to survive. Eric Loren plays him with a weary, halting sadness that sells it far better than the costume has any right to allow. His pitch, when he finally makes it, is genuinely unsettling coming out of that mouth: a Dalek standing in a sewer arguing that a race incapable of love or doubt or hesitation has already lost, and that the only way forward is to become partly the very thing they’ve spent a million years exterminating. Strip away the tentacles and it’s a decent argument, honestly made. Which is exactly what makes what happens next so grim — there is nobody in that room capable of hearing it.
It also rhymes beautifully with the last time this show put humanity inside a Dalek. Back in Dalek, a lone survivor absorbed Rose’s DNA, felt something for the first time, and found the contamination so unbearable that it destroyed itself. Sec goes the other way — he embraces it, and argues for it — and the result is no less fatal. Either way, the show’s position is consistent and bleak: a Dalek that feels cannot go on being a Dalek, and its own kind will not permit it to be anything else.
Mutiny in the Sewers
Which is exactly what happens. Thay, Jast and Caan watch their leader develop a conscience and diagnose it, correctly by their standards, as a malfunction. The Cult of Skaro was created to have imagination, and the moment imagination produces something that isn’t ruthless, they revolt against it.
The mutiny scenes are the best in the episode — Daleks debating heresy in the dark, deciding their commander is no longer pure enough to lead, chaining him up like a prisoner. When Sec finally dies, it’s throwing himself in front of a blast meant for the Doctor, and the Doctor’s reaction is the right one: not triumph but real grief. “You were the only one of them who could change.” An entire potential future for the species, shot by its own side for the crime of hesitating.
Lightning on the Empire State
The plot around all this is where things wobble. The gamma strike arrives, the Empire State Building’s mast does its job, and the Doctor — in a moment of glorious nonsense — clambers up and grabs the conductor at the critical instant so that his own Time Lord DNA gets swept into the mix. It’s a huge, silly, wonderfully Doctor-ish gesture, and it pays off in the episode’s best conceptual beat: the resulting Dalek-human army, ordered to kill, stops and asks why. Free will, smuggled in via a lightning strike. Daleks undone by a question.
Martha, it should be said, has a very good episode. She’s the one who works out what the mast is actually for, she improvises the way to get everyone up to it, and she spends a long stretch of the hour organising frightened people while the Doctor is somewhere else entirely. The self-reliance she found alone in a stolen car in Gridlock has hardened here into something closer to command, and the show barely pauses to remark on it — which is precisely the right call.
Unfortunately the hybrids themselves are a hard sell — men in period suits doing stiff Dalek voices, gunning each other down in a stairwell — and the climactic battle never looks like anything other than a handful of people in a corridor. The episode’s ambitions keep outrunning what it can actually put on screen.
The one part of the ending that lands without qualification is Solomon. Facing down the Daleks, he tries the only thing he knows: he steps forward, unarmed, and appeals to them as one living thing to another with a genuinely moving little speech about shared humanity. They kill him mid-sentence. It’s brutal and completely correct — a decent man’s decency counting for precisely nothing — and Hugh Quarshie makes it hurt.
Thay and Jast are destroyed, and Dalek Caan, alone and cornered, throws himself into an emergency temporal shift and vanishes. The last Dalek in existence, again, gone to who knows when. The Doctor lets him go, and there’s something tired in the way he does it, like a man who has had this exact conversation too many times to believe it’s the last.
It’s worth noting how differently this Doctor handles them now. There’s no gloating and no grandstanding, just an offer made flatly and without much hope, and a weary shrug when it’s refused. Whatever the Time War took out of him, the part that used to relish beating the Daleks seems to have gone along with it. He isn’t hunting them any more. He’s simply tired of them, which is somehow a bleaker place for the show to have arrived at than any amount of shouting.
There’s a warmer coda for Laszlo, whose half-converted body is failing until the Doctor improvises a fix, and who gets to walk back into Hooverville with Tallulah and be accepted by the people there. After an hour of grim arithmetic, one man getting to keep his life is a decent note to end on.
What Evolution of the Daleks Leaves Us With
Terrific ideas, rickety execution. Here’s what it plants:
- A Dalek with a conscience. Sec is the most interesting thing the show has done with the species in years, and killing him off with his own side’s blessing is a genuinely tragic move.
- Purity as a death sentence. The Cult would rather die as Daleks than survive as something else, which is both entirely in character and the whole reason they keep losing.
- Free will as a weapon. The Dalek-humans refusing an order because they can now ask “why” is a lovely, elegant resolution — better than the fight it triggers.
- Solomon’s death. The bleakest beat of the two-parter, and the one that earns its emotion outright.
- Caan, still out there. One Dalek left, running again. The show can’t seem to finish with them, and by now that feels like the point.
Rating: 2.5/5 — Carries the season’s most interesting single idea and fumbles nearly everything around it. The Sec material and Solomon’s death are genuinely strong; the hybrid army, the stairwell shootout and a good deal of the dialogue are not. A two-parter I admire more than I enjoyed.
A Dalek who learned to feel and was executed for it, and a man in a shanty town who died talking about peace. There’s a very good episode buried in this one. It just keeps getting interrupted by men in suits shouting “exterminate.”
